Occasional shop talk about journalism, technology and a few other things

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Once again, a routine running on a server somewhere in a WordPress.com data center generated a 2012 annual report for this blog. You can view that presentation by clicking on the fancy fireworks graphic below; after, I’ll share a few highlights from last year’s stats, including some that didn’t make it into this automated annual report.

Total views: 89,639, up from 74,636 last year–and with a notable spike in November and December, largely thanks to my second-biggest traffic source.

Top referrers: “Search engines” counted for almost 20,000 clickthroughs, of which about 19,000 came from various Google sites, maybe 300 from Bing and even fewer from other search options; Jim Dalrymple and Peter Cohen’s Loop Insight added up to about 8,800 and gets most of the credit for the popularity of the Surface/iPad mini and strange-search-results posts, among a few others; Twitter and USA Today followed up with about 2,000 each, and Facebook was just under that threshold.

Intangibles: I’m glad I was able to stick to writing at least a post almost every week outside my weekly-roundup self-promotion–and that some of these shorter posts that I might have held off writing in 2011 flowed into paid writing elsewhere. But I’m also happy that the writing feels like it’s been coming faster and easier here.

One pleasant bonus feature at WordPress.com is the “annual report” the site automatically provides, complete with the celebratory artwork you see below. It provides a good overview of your blog’s overall traffic, what sites sent visitors to it and what posts got the most attention–along with a corny fireworks animation and a fillip of promotion for my host. (Note to WordPress.com management: I don’t mind that. In other news, please approve my WordAds application.)

But this highlights reel glosses over many interesting wrinkles, and in my case it’s also skewed by the flood of traffic I got for announcing my departure from the Post here. So some other noteworthy details follow.

Note that I’m not using exact figures because I forgot to write down these numbers on Dec. 31, and WordPress.com doesn’t include a “last year” reporting option.

My biggest source of traffic was Twitter, at almost 3,800 views, followed by Facebook (close to 2,500), the Post (near 1,800), and “search engines” (Google, with traffic from Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and other sites amounting to kopeks on the dollar). The most notable outlier in the top 10 was the local media-news site DCRTV.com, which accounted for about 500 views.

Speaking of search engines, the search queries that led people here were topped by–duh–my name, accounting for close to 3,000 page views. Farther down the list, I counted at least 20 misspellings of my last name. It’s okay: That’s the tradeoff for having a moniker distinctive enough to guarantee that you can get the same first-name-last-name user ID at most sites.

The annual report offers a few details I don’t see on my usual stats page, such as the percentages of visitors from other countries. Sadly, I am not big in Japan, but I do seem to have a few readers in the U.K. I’d love to get a complete breakdown (hint: Facebook provides those analytics for public pages), along with software trivia like the operating systems and browsers used by visitors. Maybe next year? Until then: Thanks for reading.